New Korean war being plotted?

[yankeedoodle]

U.S-South Korean "Operational Plan" Raises the Risk of War. Calls for a "Preemptive Strike" on North Korea
http://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-south-korean-operational-plan-raises-the-risk-of-war-calls-for-a-preemptive-strike-on-north-korea/5489322
In recent months, U.S. and South Korean military officials have signed agreements that heighten the risk of conflict on the Korean Peninsula. In June, the two sides established a new operations plan named OPLAN 5015. For the most part, details of the plan remain under wraps, but the little information that has been revealed is sufficient to raise concern.

OPLAN 5015 is said to lay out the approach the U.S. and South Korea will take in limited war scenarios, and calls for a preemptive strike on North Korea, taking out its strategic targets and launching "decapitation" raids to kill North Korean leaders. There is an apparent contradiction in the use of the term 'preemptive' as a response to conflict, and implies that the aim is to carry out attacks that are out of proportion to the triggering event.

Just how much or how little it would take to put OPLAN 5015 into effect is not publicly known. Would an exchange of fire between North Korean and South Korean vessels be enough to set events into motion? Or what about an incident such as took place in 2010 when artillery shells hit Yeonpyeong Island?

Regardless, OPLAN 5015 is a disturbing recipe for an escalation of conflict. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine North Korea submitting to the assassination of its leaders and the destruction of military sites without responding in kind, with full-scale war ensuing.

Asahi Shimbun reports that sources indicated the plan "deals with surprise military provocations by Pyongyang through the use of its special forces." That seems rather a narrow focus to develop a major operations plan around, and an unnamed source told Hankyoreh that Oplan 5015 "outlines how U.S. and South Korean forces would operate during the outbreak of war or some other crisis." That wording, particularly the last three words, would appear to indicate that the plan has much broader coverage than reported by Asahi Shimbun.

The 47th annual Security Consultative Meeting was held on November 2 in Seoul, where U.S. and South Korean military leaders ratified their plans. The two sides warned that "any North Korean aggression or provocation is not to be tolerated," and agreed to implement the 4D Operational Concept, which stands for detect, disrupt, destroy, and detect.

The 4D Operational Concept relies upon South Korea's Kill Chain, which is an integrated system for tracking and carrying out preemptive strikes on North Korean missile sites, based on the perception of a possible North Korean missile launch. The Kill Chain is slated for completion about a decade from now, after which the plan will be fully capable in operational terms.

OPLAN 5015 is said to adopt a far more aggressive approach than OPLAN 5027, which it replaces. According to one source, "As far as I know, the new plan seeks for a victory in the early stage to keep war damage in the South to a minimum." That objective is based on the questionable presupposition that assassinating North Korea's leaders would lead to a quick surrender. That is a thin premise on which to gamble hundreds of thousands of lives.

In the context of hostile U.S. policy, in which any engagement with North Korea is ruled out, and the only language Washington can speak is that of sanctions and threats, the adoption of OPLAN 5015 and the 4D Operational Concept risks regional stability in Northeast Asia. It should also be recalled that in 1993-1994 and again in 2006, before he became U.S. Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter advocated attacking North Korea. Given the proclivity of U.S. leaders to condemn nearly every North Korean action as a "provocation," the unanswered question is what level of 'provocation' would trigger a preemptive attack on North Korea and plunge the Korean Peninsula into war?

Gregory Elich is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and the Advisory Board of the Korea Policy Institute. He is a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language.

[MikeWB]

No one wants war with North Korea. NK would fall relatively quickly but the results of "winning" that war would be disastrous for the whole region. Cost of reunification would be huge.

[yankeedoodle]

No one wants war with North Korea. NK would fall relatively quickly but the results of "winning" that war would be disastrous for the whole region. Cost of reunification would be huge.

Where you been livin'?    Worked in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and many other countries, didn't it?

Results would be disastrous?   Who cares?
Cost would be huge?  FANTASTIC!!   SUCCESS!!!

[MikeWB]

SK's are not retards. And US can't destabilize them.

[yankeedoodle]

SK's are not retards. And US can't destabilize them.

North Korea, not South Korea.

You don't think South Korean companies aren't drooling at low-cost labor?  They already have an industrial zone in the north, which, when the Kims get pissed off, they close, which makes the South angry.  War solves that problem.

[MikeWB]

Yes, SK. US cannot attack NK without SK knowing or accepting it. SK has a long history of not accepting US's rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-American_sentiment_in_Korea

Cheap labor is just one facet of it. Problem is that most of the things today are highly automated. NK has uneducated labor force that cannot be easily integrated or trained into SK's economy.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-18/hidden-unemployment-in-korea-casts-shadow

Destabilizing NK is one of the most trivial things that US/China/Russia/SKorea could do. Yet no one wants to touch it.

I saved this from somewhere else some time ago...

tl;dr: there won't be another war with NK for a long time. Another US civil more is much more probable than a NK-SK war.



Nothing can really be done about North Korea at present because the incentive structure behind the relevant nations' behavior doesn't allow for it. The sad truth is that, for everyone who's not an ordinary North Korean citizen or prisoner languishing in the camp system, the status quo is infinitely preferable to the collapse of the regime:
   •   China fears the influx of millions of brainwashed, malnourished refugees into its northeastern provinces. Not only would this be an expensive responsibility, but it might also strengthen separatist movements in the regions of Manchuria that already have significant ethnic Korean minorities. Also, it doesn't like the idea of a unified Korea on its borders with a U.S. base, particularly because such a state would probably be more pro-American than pro-China.
   •   Russia, same deal. Although the Russians are curiously helpful when it comes to East Asian diplomacy these days (as Victor Cha noted in The Impossible State), perhaps because they think China would be a nightmare to deal with if the U.S. weren't in the region to counter it. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, kids.
   •   Japan actually has a lot to gain from a unified Korea, although it'd probably have to fork over billions in aid money, which is something it can ill afford at present. Also, for the portion of the Japanese government that wants to strengthen the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, it's much easier to push for that against domestic opposition if the Kims are around and being their usual bugfuck crazy selves.
   •   The South Koreans are screwed the moment the Kims go under. They've studied the process of Germany's reunification very closely, and it's really nothing but bad news. Germany is still paying roughly $1 trillion per decade to reintegrate East Germany, and North Korea is so desperately poor that East Germany was a paradise by comparison. South Korea would basically be signing several generations over to the rebuilding of its northern cousin purely because the Kims made so goddamn many bad decisions. It's already having extreme difficulty integrating the few thousand North Korean refugees it gets every year because none of them are prepared for life in a modern economy. For now, it's easier to toss North Korea some aid to keep it quiet. As Andrei Lankov once observed, "This is a unique situation with few parallels in world history: a government feeding its enemy precisely to avoid its own swift victory."
   •   The U.S. is sort of in Japan's situation in that it has a lot to gain from a unified Korea, but it, too, would probably fork over several hundred billion over several decades in order to rebuild North Korea and keep South Korea from economic collapse. Also, there's really not much it can do militarily to force regime change in North Korea because the Kims might just decide, "Fuck it, launch everything" in the event of attack. (And Kim Jong-il was once recorded as having expressed this exact sentiment.) Everyone wants the concentration camps shut down and some measure of freedom for ordinary North Koreans. No one is willing to risk the population of metropolitan Seoul to do it.
   •   The Kim regime is terrified of what happened to the elites in other Soviet satellite states, and because the regime has been among the most brutal on the planet, they fear mass revenge against them in the event that their government falls. To be honest, many of them don't deserve to be targets; the younger generations were born after Kim il-Sung and his odious cohorts instituted the songbun system, series of concentration camps, personality cult, and extreme state control, and they're really not responsible for the fact that these exist. They were born into the system, they clearly benefit from it, and they help perpetuate it, but any serious objection to their lot in life would just dump them in the camps themselves with their whole family in tow. And, because they're not stupid, they also know that most revolutions and mass uprisings happen after a state has relaxed control, not before. They are only safe as long as the regime continues to do all the evil shit it's doing now.
   •   No one else is going to do anything.
Someone once facetiously suggested that the U.S. and Canada could collapse the North Korean regime overnight by offering free visas and permanent resettlement to anyone in the North Korean government and military who wanted out. Which, when you think about it, would radically alter the incentive structure I mentioned above, at least in relation to NK's elites. No one would be left but the Kims. Of course, there's no way to actually accomplish this short of flying several hundred empty passenger jets to Pyongyang, which the North Koreans will interpret as an act of war, but even the offer itself would shake the Kims to their boots.
However, this would also mean offering safe harbor to thousands of people who are directly or indirectly responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. In all likelihood, it would also mean consigning Kim Jong-un to the gallows, despite the fact that he's 30 and wasn't even alive (or was otherwise just a kid) when his idiot grandfather and father were busy running the country into the ground.
North Korea is popularly known as "The Land of Lousy Options" in diplomatic circles. This is one of the reasons as to why.

[yankeedoodle]

China fears the influx of millions of brainwashed, malnourished refugees into its northeastern provinces. Not only would this be an expensive responsibility, but it might also strengthen separatist movements in the regions of Manchuria that already have significant ethnic Korean minorities. Also, it doesn't like the idea of a unified Korea on its borders with a U.S. base, particularly because such a state would probably be more pro-American than pro-China.

Surely you understand that China is being targeted, and that the quote above is sufficient reason for the psychos to plot, and perhaps implement, war.

"Influx...of refugees."  Hmm....  Kind of sounds familiar, doesn't it?  Standard operating procedure these days. 

[MikeWB]

No one wants NK war. It's a lose-lose-lose-lose-... situation for all parties at the end of the day.

And China could mobilize troops overnight and close the border. Border with NK is not that big and there's fences on both sides.